My Ishmael (Ishmael 3) - Page 22

I stood up and told him I’d see him next Saturday then. When this produced no reaction after about thirty seconds, I said, “Isn’t that all right?”

“It’s not exactly ideal,” he said.

I told him school had just started, and I always tried to set a good example for myself during the first few weeks. Which meant being serious about homework on school nights.

“Let me explain the situation, Julie. I’m in a difficult position.” He waved a hand at his surroundings. “Maintaining me in these quarters has been the undertaking of a friend of long standing, Rachel Sokolow. She died two months ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said, the way people do.

“I called my position difficult, but it’s much worse than that. In two weeks I’ll be forced to vacate these premises.”

“Where will you go?”

He shook his head. “I’m still working that out. What you must understand just now is that I don’t have much time left here. This means it isn’t practical for you to think of coming just on weekends.”

I picked at this for a minute, then asked if Alan Lomax was helping him.

“Why do you ask that?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just figured you could hardly move out of here without help.”

“Alan isn’t helping me,” Ishmael stated. “He knows nothing about it. There’s no need for him to know about it. There is a need for you to know about it, because you were thinking we had all the time in the world.” I guess he could see that I wasn’t satisfied with what he was telling me, because he went on. “Alan has been with me for a couple of weeks already, almost daily, and we will soon have gone just about as far as we can go together.”

Even so, there was obviously something he was carefully not explaining, which was why Alan was being kept in the dark. Even if he didn’t need to know about Ishmael’s forthcoming move, why not know about it?

It was then that Ishmael showed me he could “say” things without using words. He could sort of beam me an attitude, and the attitude he beamed at me was: This is none of your business.

It wasn’t nearly as flat and gruff as it looks spelled out in words. And of course I already knew it was none of my business. Snoops always know exactly what is and isn’t their business.

A visit to Calliope

Ishmael seemed relieved to have his problem out in the open. We were working under a deadline and could not afford to shilly-shally. All the same, I did begin our next session with a question that was probably superfluous:

“If you knew you had only a few weeks left here, why did you put that ad in the newspaper?”

He grunted. “I put the ad in the newspaper precisely because I have only a few weeks left here. This may well be my last chance.”

“Your last chance to do what?”

“To get someone to take this away.”

“ ‘This’ being what’s in your head?” He nodded. “Excuse me if I’m being dense, but I thought you’d already had lots of pupils.”

“That’s right, but none of them has taken away what you’ll take away, Julie. None of them has taken away what Alan will take away. Each of you encodes the message differently. Each of you has received a different telling and will transmit a different telling—of the same message.”

“Alan hasn’t heard the story of the dancers?”

“No, and you won’t hear the story of the hapless airman. The stories you hear are stories created for you in particular, at particular times when you need to hear them, as the stories Alan hears are stories created for him in particular, at particular times when he needs to hear them. And with that as an introduction, I’ll present another one I prepared for you last night. You remember I said that the story of how you came to be this way would take several tellings.”

“Yes.”

“The story of Terpsichore was the first telling. This, the story of Calliope (named after the muse of epic poetry), is the second.”

“This is another planet you would definitely want to visit on your quest for enlightenment,” Ishmael began. “Life emerged on Calliope in much the same way it did on earth. Those who wish to imagine that God called every species to life in a final, changeless form are welcome to do so, but I’m incapable of embracing such a primitive scenario. If one accepts the invitation to think of God as a parent, then one must wonder what sort of parent would actually care to bring his or her children into being as fully formed adults, all ready to soar like eagles,

see like hawks, run like cheetahs, hunt like sharks, and think like computer scientists. Only a very unimaginative and insecure one, I feel.

“Be that as it may, the creatures of Calliope came into being by means of the process generally known as evolution. There’s no reason to imagine that this process is unique to earth. On the contrary, for reasons that will become plain, it would be very surprising if it were so.

Tags: Daniel Quinn Ishmael Classics
Source: readsnovelonline.net
readsnovelonline.net Copyright 2016 - 2024